Modern Substitutes for Christianity Part 10

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APPENDIX IX

'Let me say at once that if after the elimination of all untruths from Christianity, we could build a belief in G.o.d and Immortality on the residue, we should then have a far more powerful incentive to right conduct than anything that I am about to urge.'--PHILIP VIVIAN, _Churches and Modern Thought_, p. 323.

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APPENDIX X

'Without prejudice, what would be the effect upon modern civilisation if the Divine Ideal should vanish from modern thought?

'It would be presumptuous to attempt a description, rather because it is so hard to picture ourselves and our outlook deprived of what we have held during thousands of generations, our very _raison d'etre_, than because we cannot calculate at least a part of what would have to happen. Without pretending to undertake that exercise, it may not be too bold to conclude definitely, what has been suggested argumentatively throughout: namely, that moral goodness, as we trace it in the past, as we enjoy it in the present, as we reckon upon it in the future, would be found undesirable and therefore impracticable. A new "morality" would doubtless take its place and set up a new ideal of goodness; but the former would no more represent the elements we so far call moral than the latter would embody the conceptions we now call good: the more logically the inevitable system were followed up, the more progressively would moral inversion be realised.

'It does not seem credible that the new morality could escape being egoistic and hedonistic, and these principles alone would dictate complete reversal of all our present notions as to what is n.o.ble, what is useful, what is good. An egoist hedonism that should not be selfish and sensual is a fond {231} superst.i.tion; it would have to be both and frankly. All the prophylactic expedients whereby a reciprocal egoism must safeguard its sensuous rights would certainly be there; and they represent in spirit and in practice whatever we have learned to consider execrable. We do not require Professor Haeckel[1] to inform us, with the triumphal rhetoric that accompanies a grand new discovery, of the prudential homicide which is to confer a supreme blessing upon humanity, for it has raged throughout antiquity, and still stalks abroad in daylight wherever the kingdom of men is not also the kingdom of Christ. Ten minutes' thought is sufficient to convince any rational man or woman what must inevitably follow in a world of animal rationalism, where no souls are immortal, where the human will is the supreme will and there is eternal peace in the grave. It could scarcely transpire otherwise than that "euthanasia" should replace care of the chronic sick and indigent aged; that infanticide should be in a large category of circ.u.mstances encouraged, and in some compelled; that suicide should offer a rational escape from all serious ills, leaving a door ever hospitably ajar to receive the body bankrupt in its capacity for sensual enjoyment, the only enjoyment henceforth worthy of the name. These are the "virtues" under the new morality; there are other things of which it were not well to speak. Imagination turns its back.

In a world that has never been without its G.o.ds, among human creatures who have never existed without a conscience, deeds have been done and horrors have been practised through centuries, through ages, that make annals read like ogre-tales and books of travels like the works of morbid novelists; and the worst always goes unrecorded. What then ought we to antic.i.p.ate for a world yielding obedience to nothing loftier {232} than the human intellect, seeking no prize obtainable outside the individual life time, logically incapable of any gratification outside the individual body, convinced of nothing save eternal oblivion in the ever-nearing and inevitable grave, and reposed on the calm a.s.surance that "goodness" and "badness," "virtue" and "vice" (whatever these terms may then correspond to) are recompensed, indifferently, by nothing better and nothing worse than physical animal death?'--JASPER B. HUNT, B.D., _Good without G.o.d: Is it Possible_? p.

51.

[1] See _The Wonders of Life_, chap. v., popular translation, and other works.

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APPENDIX XI

'When we say that G.o.d is personal, we do not mean that He is localised by mutually related organs; that He is hampered by the physical conditions of human personality. We mean that He is conscious of distinctness from all other beings, of moral relation to all living things, and of power to control both from without and from within the action of every atom and of every world. This is what we mean by personality in G.o.d. It is not a materialistic idea. It is essentially spiritual. It is a breakwater against the destruction of the very thought of G.o.d, or the submersion of it in the mere processes of eternal evolution. There is a Pantheism which obliterates every trace of Divine personality, which takes from G.o.d consciousness, will, affection, emotion, desire, presiding and over-ruling intelligence.

But such Pantheism is better known as Atheism. It destroys the only G.o.d who can be a refuge and a strength in time of trouble. It annihilates that mighty conscience which drives the workers of iniquity into darkness and the shadow of death, if possible, to hide themselves.

It closes the Divine Ear against the prayer of faith. It abolishes all sympathy, all communion between the Father and the children. It makes G.o.d not the world's life, but the world's grave. Therefore, against all such Pantheism our being revolts.'--PETER S. MENZIES, _Sermons_ ('Christian Pantheism').

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APPENDIX XII

'There is an Old Testament Pantheism speaking unmistakably out of the lips of the Prophets and the Psalmists, ... so interwoven with their deepest thoughts of G.o.d, that any hesitation to receive it would have been traced by them most probably to purely heathen conditions of thought, which ascribes to every divinity a limited function, a separate home, and a restricted authority.... But undoubtedly the most unequivocal and outspoken Pantheist in the Bible is St. Paul. He speaks in that character to the Athenians, affirming all men to be the offspring of G.o.d, and, as if this were not a sufficiently close bond of affinity, adding, "In Him we live and move and have our being." His Pantheistic eschatology casts a radiance over the valley of the shadow of death, which makes the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians one of the most precious gifts of Divine inspiration which the holy volume contains. "And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that G.o.d may be all and all." Nor, if he had wished to administer a daring shock to the ultra-Calvinism of our own Confessional theology, could he have uttered a sentiment more hard to reconcile with any view of the Universe that is not Pantheistic than that contained in the 32nd verse of the present chapter: "For G.o.d hath concluded them all in unbelief that He might have mercy upon all." It {235} is quite clear in the face of all this Scripture evidence that there is a form of Pantheism which is not only innocent, defensible, justifiable, but which we are bound to teach as of the essence of all true theology.

Nothing could be more childish than that blind horror of Pantheism which shudders back from it as the most poisonous form of rank infidelity.'--PETER S. MENZIES, _Sermons_ ('Christian Pantheism'),

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APPENDIX XIII

'Pantheism gives n.o.ble expression to the truth of G.o.d's presence in all things, but it cannot satisfy the religious consciousness: it cannot give it escape from the limitations of the world, or guarantee personal immortality or (what is most important) give any adequate interpretation to sin, or supply any adequate remedy for it....

Christian theology is the harmony of Pantheism and Deism. On the one hand Christianity believes all that the Pantheist believes of G.o.d's presence in all things. "In Him," we believe, "we live and move and are; in Him all things have their coherence." All the beauty of the world, all its truths, all its goodness, are but so many modes under which G.o.d is manifested, of whose glory Nature is the veil, of whose word it is the expression, whose law and reason it embodies. But G.o.d is not exhausted in the world, nor dependent upon it: He exists eternally in His Triune Being, self-sufficing, self-subsistent.... G.o.d is not only in Nature as its life, but He transcends it as its Creator, its Lord--in its moral aspect--its Judge. So it is that Christianity enjoys the riches of Pantheism without its inherent weakness on the moral side, without making G.o.d dependent on the world, as the world is on G.o.d.'--BISHOP GORE, _The Incarnation of the Son of G.o.d_, p. 136.

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APPENDIX XIV

'The Supreme Power on this petty earth can be nothing else but the Humanity, which, ever since fifty thousand--it may be one hundred and fifty thousand--years has slowly but inevitably conquered for itself the predominance of all living things on this earth, and the mastery of its material resources. It is the collective stream of Civilization, often baffled, constantly misled, grievously sinning against itself from time to time, but in the end victorious; winning certainly no heaven, no millennium of the saints, but gradually over great epochs rising to a better and a better world. This Humanity is not all the human beings that are or have been. It is a living, growing, and permanent Organism in itself, as Spencer and modern philosophy establish. It is the active stream of Human Civilization, from which many drop out into that oblivion and nullity which is the true and only h.e.l.l.'--F. HARRISON, _Creed of a Lagman_, p. 72.

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APPENDIX XV

Mr. Frederic Harrison's Creed 'is open to every objection which he so justly brings against what he regards as Mr. Spencer's Creed. These reasons are broad, common, and familiar. So far as I know they never have been, and I do not believe they ever will be, answered. The first objection is that Humanity with a capital H (Mr. Harrison's G.o.d) is neither better nor worse fitted to be a G.o.d than his Unknowable with a capital U. They are as much alike as six and half-a-dozen. Each is a barren abstraction to which any one an attach any meaning he likes.

Humanity, as used by Mr. Harrison, is not an abstract name for those matters in which all human beings as such resemble each other, as, for instance, a human form and articulate speech.... Humanity is a general name for all human beings who, in various ways, have contributed to the improvement of the human race. The Positivist calendar which appropriates every day in the year for the commemoration of one or more of these benefactors of mankind is an attempt to give what a lawyer would call "further and better particulars" of the word. If this, or anything like this, be the meaning of Mr. Harrison's G.o.d, I must say that he, she, or it appears to me quite as ill-fitted for wors.h.i.+p as the Unknowable. How can a man wors.h.i.+p an indefinite number of dead people, most of whom are unknown to him even by name, and many of whose characters {239} were exceedingly faulty, besides which the facts as to their lives are most imperfectly known? How can he in any way combine these people into a single object of thought? An object of wors.h.i.+p must surely have such a degree of unity that it is possible to think about it as distinct from other things, as much unity at least as the English nation, the Roman Catholic Church, the Great Western Railway.

No doubt these are abstract terms, but they are concrete enough for practical purposes. Every one understands what is meant when it is a.s.serted that the English nation is at war or at peace; that the Pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church; that the Great Western Railway has declared a dividend; but what is Humanity? What can any one definitely a.s.sert or deny about it? How can any one meaning be affixed to the word so that one person can be said to use it properly and another to abuse it? It seems to me that it is as Unknowable as the Unknowable itself, and just as well, and just as ill, fitted to be an object of wors.h.i.+p.'--SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN, 'The Unknowable and Unknown,' _Nineteenth Century_, June 1884.

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APPENDIX XVI

'Deism and Pantheism are both so irrational, so utterly inadequate to explain the simplest facts of our moral and spiritual life that neither of them can long hold mankind together. Positivism, which has made a systematic and memorable attempt to fill the gap, itself bears witness to the craving of human nature for some stronger bond than such systems can supply; while its appreciation of the necessity of Religion gives it an importance not possessed by mere Agnosticism. Yet it is impossible to look at an encyclopaedic attempt to grasp all knowledge and all history, such as that made by the founder of Positivism, without a deep, oppressive sadness....

'Can men heap fact upon fact and connect science with science in a splendid hierarchy and find no better end than this? Is such a review to come to this, that we must wors.h.i.+p either actual humanity with all its meanness and wickedness, or ideal humanity which does not yet exist, and, if this world is all in all, may never come into being? ...

For ideal humanity, however moral and enlightened, if unaided by G.o.d, as the Posivitist holds, is still earth-bound and sense-bound.... We are told that it is common sense to recognise that much is beyond us.

Perfectly true. But it is not common sense to wors.h.i.+p an ignorant and weak humanity which certainly made nothing, and has in itself no a.s.surance {241} of continuance in the future, nay rather, a very clear probability of destruction, if simply left to itself.

'What Positivism surely needs to give it hope and consistency is the doctrine of the Logos, of the Eternal Word and Reason, the Creator, Orderer, and Sustainer of all things, Who has taken a stainless human nature that He might make men capable of all knowledge. This Divine Humanity of the Logos, drawing mankind into Himself, is indeed worthy of all wors.h.i.+p. In loving Him, we learn really what it is to "live for others." In looking to Him we cease from selfishness and pride. Such a wors.h.i.+p of humanity is not a mere baseless hope, but a reality appearing in the very midst of history, a reality apprehended by Faith indeed, but by a Faith always proving itself to those, and by those, who hold it fast in Love. There is room, then, ample room, and a loud demand for the re-establishment of a Christian Philosophy based upon the Incarnation.'--JOHN WORDSWORTH (Bishop of Salisbury), _The One Religion_, pp. 307-309.

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APPENDIX XVII

The invariable laws under which Humanity is placed have received various names at different periods. Destiny, Fate, Necessity, Heaven, Providence, all are so many names of one and the same conception: the laws which man feels himself under, and that without the power of escaping from them. We claim no exemption from the common lot. We only wish to draw out into consciousness the instinctive acceptance of the race, and to modify the spirit in which we regard them. We accept: so have all men. We obey: so have all men. We venerate: so have some in past ages or in other countries. We add but one other term--we love. We would perfect our submission and so reap the full benefits of submission in the improvement of our hearts and tempers. We take in conception the sum of the conditions of existence, and we give them an ideal being and a definite home in s.p.a.ce, the second great creation which completes the central one of Humanity. In the bosom of s.p.a.ce we place the world, and we conceive of the world and this our Mother Earth as gladly welcomed to that bosom with the simplest and purest love, and we give our love in return.

Thou art folded, thou art lying In the light which is undying.

'Thus we complete the Trinity of our religion, Humanity, the World, and s.p.a.ce. So completed we recognise power to {243} give unity and definiteness to our thoughts, purity and warmth to our affections, scope and vigour to our activity. We recognise its powers to regulate our whole being, to give us that which it has so long been the aim of all religion to give--internal union. We recognise its power to raise us above ourselves and by intensifying the action of our unselfish instincts to bear down unto their due subordination our selfishness.

We see in it yet unworked treasures. We count not ourselves to have apprehended but we press forward to the prize of our high calling. But even now whilst its full capabilities are unknown to us, before we have apprehended, we find enough in it to guide and strengthen us.'--'_The New Religion in its Att.i.tude towards the Old_: A Sermon preached at South Field, Wandsworth, Wednesday, 19th Moses 71 (19th January 1859), on the anniversary of the birth of Auguste Comte, 19th January 1798, by RICHARD CONGREVE.' J. Chapman: 8 King William Street, Strand, London.